Asymptotic Compressibility of Entanglement and Classical Communication in Distributed Quantum Computation

Abstract

We consider implementations of a bipartite unitary on many pairs of unknown input states by local operation and classical communication assisted by shared entanglement. We investigate to what extent the entanglement cost and the classical communication cost can be compressed by allowing nonzero but vanishing error in the asymptotic limit of infinite pairs. We show that a lower bound on the minimal entanglement cost, the forward classical communication cost, and the backward classical communication cost per pair is given by the Schmidt strength of the unitary. We also prove that an upper bound on these three kinds of the cost is given by the amount of randomness that is required to partially decouple a tripartite quantum state associated with the unitary. In the proof, we construct a protocol in which quantum state merging is used. For generalized Clifford operators, we show that the lower bound and the upper bound coincide. We then apply our result to the problem of distributed compression of tripartite quantum states, and derive a lower and an upper bound on the optimal quantum communication rate required therein.